So I had my first weigh-in of the year last night, and it wasn’t as ugly as I feared.  I am in the neighborhood of 40 pounds under my heaviest weight ever, and about 25 pounds above my lowest, and not quite in the obese range of BMI so score!

The thing is I feel way fatter than I remember feeling when I have been in the neighborhood of this weight before.  Possibly because I have been running and not doing bad keeping up with my pushups, so my top third and bottom third are not as disgusting and flabby as my middle third.  I am sort of shaped like the Greek letter phi (ϕ) except instead of a well-defined circle with clear boundaries, my mid-section is kind of like a hefty bag full of uncooked bread dough but more liquidy.  Sometimes I try to squish it down under my belt but ultimately I will pass by a mirror and my pants just look too high waisted because it is obvious my belt is right below my navel and that is not the fashion these days at all.  And so I will lower my belt and floop, out everything goes again.  For an entire week I wore a sportcoat with jeans to work and every social event I attended, which as you may know, is the sophisticated man’s Tommy Bahama shirt: loosely fitting, no tucking, obscuring the ugly truth.

And what is worse is that I can always, always feel it.  If I’m running, or walking, or driving or sitting and reading, it is right there, just sloughing around in my lap, taking the shape of its surroundings like a pile of warm tapioca.  And my poor wife shares a bed with me.

So anyways, I am trying to emerge from the holiday, which this year was like a typhoon of gin, ranch dressing and fudge, with some decent resolve to not be repulsive.  My family deserves it and any excuse I come up with is bullshit because every time I’ve been able to refrain from gorging myself on high ABV beers and mini-eggrolls for a few months, I’ve lost weight.  I don’t want to spend another summer as the dad who has to jetski with his shirt on, even with a popped collar.  What son wants to see that?